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Bridgestone, the company which debuted the "world's thinnest" sheet of two-color e-paper last year, has turned around and delivered a new version which is capable of displaying over four thousand colors. "In case that wasn't enough, the company is also touting what it calls the "world's largest full color e-paper that is A3 size, which is equivalent to a 21.4-inch screen." As you'd expect, the latter is expected to be used solely for advertising and could hit the market as early as next year, while the former technology is set to be commercially available in 2009."

I thought one of the main selling points of e-paper was that you could read it just as well in bright sunlight as in normal interior lighting. Texas summer sun is probably brighter than a scanner's lamp.

As I understand it, part of why everyone is so excited about e-paper is that the image remains on the page when the power is no longer being applied. So, the fail-proof way around ANY e-paper DRM is just take out the batteries before you photocopy/scan it.

That would require some form of brightness sensor that a)would drive up costs and b) could be easily defeated by just taping over the seonsor area. Covering the whole of the reading area with tiny sensors seems a little like overkill (not that this would ever have stopped DRM proponents, but still).

You could use just about any kind of halfway decent digital camera to take long exposures (when I say long I mean 1/5 of a second or so.) You get the same image as then scanner and there would be no way for the E-paper to tell what was soaking up all the photons that were reflected off of it.

I can burn and rip itunes music but quality is arguably lost in many cases. Likewise, if I want a perfect digital conversion I will have to hack away but if I'm content with a low quality bittorrent version then I can just photocopy it
Im not sure if I'm being sarcastic or not:P

Heh, I get your point there, but most of the music I've gotten through torrents is at least 192 kbps CBR, usually 256-320 (CBR/VBR). Some FLAC too.I do have experience with audio, and for me, 192 kbps sounds perfectly acceptable for normal listening. So you're either using a shitty tracker or looking for some obscure album, or you're a very strict audiophile.:P

Nah actually I don't use bittorrent (hands in geekcard).. I am an audiophile when i'm in control but i cant tell when i get stuff my friends.. i was trying to make a point but yeah the bittorrent comparison was dumb in retrospect.. maybe if we're talking mp3s from kazaa circa 02 or something (hopefully that makes more sense.. just pulling it out of my ass as well lol)

You can do better than that. Use a lens to focus the thing into a high quality digital camera and you can capture a whole video stream ( this works for TFTs as well ). Only issue is to synchronise the camera to the paper's refresh rate, and this is fairly easy to do if you have good equipment.

Thing with DRM is that it can't work in a free society. The only way it could work would be if the government banned all recording equipment other th

The only way it could work would be if the government banned all recording equipment other than that controlled by the media industry (and the DMCA is certainly playing with the idea by banning you from distributing circumvention methods, given that a non-DRM-crippled digital camera is a perfectly decent circumvention method).

Read up on the AHRA [wikipedia.org]. It didn't help the recording industry in the end...

I remember some copy protection in the early 90's for a game. You had to look up a number in a table in the manual. But the text was black on very dark brown. I'm assuming that it wasn't able to be copied by a copy machine because there wasn't enough contrast between the two colors.

As in, the fact that they aren't revealing them means that they aren't anything to write home about.
Refresh rates are going to keep this technology confined to ebook readers and advertising posters. I want stuff like this [blogspot.com].

I would love to have an A3-sized e-reader for schematics. Having the ability to search my documents (where is R217?) without having to deal with the cumbersome laptops with small displays, would be great. I imagine a scroll with the batteries and processor in the center, or a folding book. Either way you would have the option of using it in A3 or A4 size depending on what you need to do. It wouldn't need a huge amount of memory, especially if it had WiFi. It wouldn't need a high a refresh rate or many colors - I could get by with monochrome, 16 colors would be nice, 256 would be exorbitant. Just high resolution PDF view and file browser and I'd be happy. Bonus points for excel documents.

I like where you're going with this. A dual A3/A4 device would be incredibly useful in workplace, where most stuff is printed in A4 but you often need to go to A3 for diagrams (especially Gantt charts).

The beauty of ISO standard paper sizes [cam.ac.uk] is that each in the series is exactly half the size of the next largest - i.e. the long edge of A4 is the same length as the short edge of A3. Therefore, if you want an A4 display you unroll your scroll half way. If you want an A3 display then you unroll it all the w

As in, the fact that they aren't revealing them means that they aren't anything to write home about. Refresh rates are going to keep this technology confined to ebook readers and advertising posters.

I wouldn't bee too sure. While it will probably be a while before you get HD-video on these things at an affordable price ( 5 years ? ) you really don't need that much in order to browse the web. 5 frames a second would be more than enough to navigate static content, and 24 would be enough for simple animated st

I very much enjoyed reading your blog entry about your info-pad idea [blogspot.com]. Here's my own idea, worth what you just paid for it: How about a low-tech device that operates as snazzy e-book reader on-the-cheap? E-book readers like Sony's crud are too expensive (though Sony's problem is stupid marketing - not their e-book price). They take cheap e-ink that could be used to paint huge signs, and they cover them with low-yield expensive thin-film transistors. It's a bastardized hybrid, like mating a man and an ape

I beg to differ. Consider all the tree paper being used in photocopiers each year. What if a new system were put in place where a photocopier could output images to re-usable e-pages? So instead of throwing out the old memos, you recycle them in the machine. This could save huge amounts of money. Also consider fax machines. Though outdated by email, they are still used widely but are inundated by spam faxes. But if fax sheets were recyclable, this would reduce the amount of ink and paper thrown out. Bridge

It seems to me that refresh rates are not too important when it comes to the major advantages of electronic paper, namely that (1) it is eventually going to be a great replacement for many uses of normal paper, and (2) it only consumes energy when the image is refreshed, so a single battery charge can be used to view static text and images for a long time.

...can you bend the critter (or at least build it as a wrap-around type screen), without optical distortion (or at least some sort of compensation against it by a GPU)? It would add one hell of a dimension to gaming, simulators, immersion-type entertainment, things like that.

I realize it's probably possible to do when building it, but it takes a pretty (relatively) hefty chunk of time to do anisotropic conversions of flat images (e.g. when creating image-based lighting maps for CG artwork raytracing and such), but if that could be fixed, a semi-spherical screen with the focal point being a person's head would be hella nice.

(of course, they'd still have to add about 15.9-something million colors in capability and perhaps a tighter resolution to it as well, but still... looks like it could go to some interesting places if they actually get it working).

Well, in one year they have advanced from 8 color (1 bit RGB) to 4096 color (4 bits RGB). That's pretty good considering they have to create a high resolution flexible display A3 size. By next year, they probably will have 8-bit RGB, and in the future maybe even 16-bit channels, which would be good enough for photography. Just make sure the top of the display is glossy and it will look like a magazine.

Can't wait til these babies start rolling out as it'll seriously push the display market with some nice competition to increase pixel density and so on. Once people figure out how to hack these things it's going to seriously affect LCD prices. Wheee. Sadly that'll lead to DRM usage on them so people don't hijack their ads. Eh.

What I need is a rather thin (.5 mm is enough), black and white e-paper screen with high res and low power use, in an A4/letter format. This would save me hundreds of copies of paper. I'm willing to pay up to a grand for that. Why are these idiots always focusing on full color, bendable screens? I would consider them nice extras, nothing more.

Assuming you unstated unit of currency is a US dollar or something worth more per unit (not hard these days *cough*) AND "hundreds of copies" is no more than 1000, then I have to diagnose a merely tenuous grasp on Economics on your part. That, or you just love gadgets, which makes this your place then. Carry on.

Either way, to not embarass yourself, you should stop insulting people that satisfy a market subset that has more elements than {You}

It would save me hundreds of copies of paper in my bag, my bad. It would save thousands of copies of paper each year. I try to do things on my laptop, but this is in general just not feasible. It would also make it much easier to search and annotate things, provided that this is supported of course. And I know any of my colleagues would feel the same. In my opinion, this is not a minor niche of the market. It's a *huge* market. Instead these guys keep on focusing on (slightly) bendable screens and colors.I'

Sort of. The OLPC screen isn't A4 size, but the idea is the same - low power, high res, high contrast screen to replace textbooks (what they do is switch off the backlight and use each RGB pixel as three black&white pixels viewable using natural light.

My budget is not that big that I try this technology without looking. 1024 x 768 is not exactly hi-res, nor is it 4A. Otherwise, the price is fine with me. But I've been following the technology for some time, and I'm seriously interested in it. Maybe I can order one to test for my company.

It's not 1024*4. Although that is mathematically correct, it's not the correct way to interpret colour depth on a computer. 4096 in this instance is 16*16*16. There are 4096 colours available to the display because it is using a range of 16 values (4 bits) for each of the three channels, Red, Green, and Blue. 0 means none of that particular colour and 15 means the most intense shade of that colour. The three base RGB colours get combined with their various values of 0 to 15 to give new colours like shades o

Maybe I'm missing something, but don't we already have a means of displaying digital documents? Can someone explain to me the point of distributing an "e-subscription" on "e-paper" when most people are spending more and more of their time on computers?

Novel, yes. Useful, I don't know...but I can buy more paper than I'll need in an entire year for $30 at Staples.

Tell me, what would you rather look at: an LCD display, or something that is (for reading purposes) just like a sheet of paper? These are easier on your eyes, they're readable in sunlight, and consume less power (only on for changing pages)

Yeah, but real paper is easier yet on my eyes, also readable in sunlight and uses no power at all once it's printed.

Let's say an "e-paper tablet" comes on the market for...what...$500? I can buy 80,000 sheets of paper for the same price. I could use 50 sheets a day, every day, for FOUR YEARS and still come out ahead.

Make clothing from this material and see what it does to fashion! I'm a tech guy and shouldn't be allowing my brain to go here, but imagine: as with your dumb-ass you-paid-$2.99-for-what? ringtones, you'll be able to download patterns for your shirts, slacks and skirts! Hooked up to your cameraphone, hell, you could even be invisible!

Patterns? Screw that -- I'm gonna show Blade Runner on mine. Since it won't have speakers, you won't be able to hear the voice-overs by Harrison Ford that were put in at the last minute to save Ridley Scott's ass! Woot!!!!

The only readers out currently are way over priced. $300 is a bit too much for the feature set that the sony reader provides. This new tech is great but if the price is the same, or worse, the market is just going to take forever to develop and these things are just not gonna sell. I have craved epaper for over a decade now and I still can't quite justify spending $300. I have never seen anyone with one and i live in the valley.I hope at some point drops into the reasonable range and I can enjoy the future

Because the last time I checked, color e-paper had a resolution of about 70dpi, and an A4-paper sized ebook reader using color epaper was about 2500 bucks. Since the article does not address either of these details, I have no reason to assume that their state of affairs is any different than what I've already known about. Both price and resolution need to be favorably improved by about a factor of 5 before I expect that they will be seriously considered as popular consumer-level devices.

Well I can only hope this catches on.. the pavement. I really need to know what kind of traction this technology will provide. I don't know how I feel about 4,000 colors spinning around the corner as I speed down the pike, but, I'll accept it as long as it keeps me on the road.

Horrible, toxic, non-renewable phosphorescent chemicals and heavy metals that are only used once, instead of once per page, but which still inevitably head to the land fill where they fail to rot into base organics the way paper does.

So many comments about the small color range, but really this isn't a problem if the dot pitch is small enough. Printed paper only has 8 colors (16 if you include black in CMYB). Back in the day with only 4-16 colors we dithered to get a better range of colors, the look was similar to old comic books and for much the same reason. With 4096 colors to choose from dithering is very subtle and hard to notice. My 1998 laptop monitor only had 4096 colors, but dithering made it look fine. It's unclear to me whether most LCDs even today have full true 24 bit color.

I want Sony's second gen reader too. You'll have a problem with PDF's though. The Reader has issues with the PDF format because it doesn't have an 8.5x11 display and the size is an issue. Might be fixed in the new version.

None of the available e-paper solutions are anywhere near the thickness or flexibility needed to make it practical to produce devices consisting of more than one or two "sheets". I doubt we'll see devices anything remotely like what you're suggesting for decades vs. at most two-"sheet" devices.

I'm with you on this one. The first time I ever heard about E-Ink (years ago), I thought about electronic wallpaper. Make the thing wi-fi, where you simply upload an image (FTP, networked drive, etc) to each specific panel, and it would be incredible. Make them standard 4x8 panels for about 100$ each and you'll make a fortune.Then imagine linking your wall to a webcam service from around the world, it could give you a "real-time" view from anywhere. "Where do you want to go today?" would have been the perfe